There’s a little more debate though, about whether or not the vinyl sounds even better. The measurements made by the TT Meter seem to show that it’s much more dynamic – but can we hear it ?

This video shows you the process I used to reach my own conclusion – and demonstrates exactly how EQ balance is crucial to our perception of “dynamics”, along the way. You may be surprised by what I found !

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Comments

Hi Ian,
Thanks for the video – Hearing the vinyl comparison reminds me of the day an audiophile guy was showing off his system he’d built – handmade speakers etc, and he played a nice orchestral piece on CD while cueing up the identical track on vinyl to run simultaneously. After a minute or so of enjoying the crystal clear CD fidelity he flicked the switch over to the vinyl – and it was like we suddenly went from the middle of the auditorium to the middle of the orchestra.
The whole room “opened up”.

It seems to me that there are things going on in live music, and details that just can’t be captured by digital 1’s and 0’s.

I guess once you rip a vinyl track into digital you’ve already lost much of the x-factor in the music.

I’m curious why you didn’t mention the waveform captures you have of the two versions. The CD version appears to be rather dramatically brick-walled at a certain point, while the vinyl retains all the nice peaks. Isn’t that indicative of more dynamic range existing in the vinyl release? I would assume that’s why the vinyl sounded punchier, even after the EQ tweaks, and why the TT Meter was awarding the vinyl with a few extra dB of range. I know the picture doesn’t tell the whole story, but it seems to be compelling evidence. What are your thoughts?

With all of the tweaks, you got the two tonally closer, but there’s still an aliveness to the vinyl that the CD doesn’t really have. The music breathes more with the vinyl.

There is a very high end audio shop not too far from me, and the sales guys are all engineers. They talk of accuracy and played me an amp they had set up. I had brought a new amp I had recently purchased to compare. One sounded “accurate” but sterile. The music sang through the other. The sales guy could only shrug his shoulders when I pointed out that the amp I had brought, similarly priced to their’s, seemed to breath more life into the music. Their’s might have been a bit more resolving of detail, but sounded flatter dynamically.

I think you’re all missing the point that the vinyl was mastered from a digital file.

If the vinyl sounds better, has more “life” or has a greater dynamic range, where do these benefits come from, since they weren’t in the original file ? Does vinyl automagically add “great audio mojo” somehow ?

That sounds facetious, but I think if that’s what we’re saying, we need a plausible explanation of where the vinyl benefits come from.